It's hard to believe that Safari just turned nine years old. Prior to launching its own browser, Apple bundled Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac (apart from a brief experiment in 1996 with its own OpenDoc-based browser components named Cyberdog).

With both Netscape and Microsoft treating the Macintosh platform as a secondhand project, Steve Jobs initiated the Safari project so Mac users could have a first rate, competitive web browser. Apple hired Netscape's Dave Hyatt in mid 2002, who had worked on the Mozilla browser since 1997, creating the Chimera/Camino browser as well as co-founding the Phoenix/Firefox browser with Blake Ross.

Rather than using Mozilla's open browser code (which he was intimately familiar with, and which was derived from Netscape), Hyatt and the Safari team leveraged the largely unknown open source KHML web rendering engine to rapidly deliver the first version of Safari within months.

Resurrecting the web

As Safari's developer, Apple rapidly became an important contributor to the HTML standards process, with Safari leading the effort to work toward standards compliance, highlighted by being the first to past tests such as Acid2. Apple is also a primary contributor to the HTML5 specification.

Apple was required by KHTML's licensing terms to share its improvements to the web and JavaScript rendering engine, which it did under the LGPL WebCore and JavaScriptCore projects. But Apple also went further and also made its own complete layout engine available as open source too, under the name WebKit.

WebKit allowed other vendors to quickly develop entire browsers for their own devices and platforms, sharing the same type of standards compliance that Safari had helped to initiate on the Mac. Apple launched its own WebKit Safari browsers for OS X and Windows, followed by a mobile version for iOS.

Other vendors, ranging from Nokia to Google to RIM to Samsung, have also used WebKit to deliver Safari-like browsers. Apart from Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 browser, virtually every mobile device and smartphone now uses a WebKit browser, giving WebKit nearly 100% market share among mobile devices.

Thanks to Google's proliferation of its WebKit based Chrome browser on Windows and Macs, WebKit now also makes up about 24 percent of desktop users' browsers, compared to Microsoft's 53 percent share with Internet Explorer and Mozilla's 21 percent share with Firefox.

Apple's next version of Safari in Mountain Lion also incorporates some unique new features that are lacking in other WebKit browsers such as Chrome, including new privacy and website alert features. The next segment Inside OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will describe how these work.

I personally prefer having the URL and search bar separate, and the 'Reader' button in 5.2 is just... Ugly. And what the hell did they do to the tabs?

Reader does come in handy from time to time, so a button for that would be welcomed. As a button it is easy to clean up.

The URL search bar integration is beyond stupid though, I really hope it gets dropped in the final release. The actions are distinctly different, especially when trying to search a document already loaded into the browser. From the human factors standpoint it just looks like a disaster.

Worst I can see Safari struggling with trying to determine what I'm doing with my typing in that box.

In after the anti-Apple brigade has screamed about the unified bar and the greying out of extended URLs.

The search bar / URL bar integration is not justified in my mind so it is worth talking about. The other issues are personal preference but in this case I see real usability and technical issues to deal with. Safari has been on a two step forward one back for years now. Lots of great improvements mixed in with a boondoggle or two every release.

The actions are distinctly different, especially when trying to search a document already loaded into the browser.

You've never used the URL bar for that anyway.

My problems with 5.2 are as follows:

I want my bookmarks to show up before search suggestions in the popup.

I want tabs to go back to the way they were. Apple, you've screwed with my tabs before (putting them on TOP, for heaven's sake), don't do it again.

I keep hitting tab when I create a new tab because I'm conditioned to expect to have to switch to the search box to do a search. But that's my fault. I welcome wholeheartedly the combination bar, it just needs to be done right.